CIA director John Brennan: ‘I will not agree to carry out some of these tactics and techniques.’
Photograph: Win McNamee/Getty Images

A future president Trump or Cruz could be defied by his own intelligence chief, after CIA director John Brennan said on Sunday he would not allow members of his agency to carry out torture techniques such as waterboarding.

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“I will not agree to carry out some of these tactics and techniques I’ve heard bandied about because this institution needs to endure,” Brennan told NBC News.

In the aftermath of the release of the torture report, Brennan defended the agency, saying: “Our reviews indicate that the detention and interrogation program produced useful intelligence that helped the United States thwart attack plans, capture terrorists and save lives.”

He added, however, that it was not certain enhanced interrogation techniques, or EITs, produced better results than more humane methods.

“The cause-and-effect relationship between the use of EITs and useful information subsequently provided by the detainee is, in my view, unknowable,” he said.

In a debate in February, Donald Trump and Ted Cruz say they would bring back waterboarding.

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Waterboarding has assumed a representative status in the discussion of torture whether by proponents, like Trump and Cruz, or opponents.

The late journalist Christopher Hitchens, for example, had himself subjected to the practice for a Vanity Fair article. Famously, he wrote: “If waterboarding does not constitute torture, then there is no such thing as torture.”